Abstract
The article offers a psychological and pastoral assessment of white racism in white progressive Christian congregations, critiquing the tendency of such communities to engage structural racism while remaining silent about their own psychic investments in white supremacy. Through the psychoanalytic lens of Jacques Lacan and critical race theorists’ analysis of whiteness as the master signifier, the article engages the author’s own experiences with racism and anti-racist work in the classroom and in worship to offer ‘struggle’ as a redefinition of the pastoral task of healing in the context of unearthing white progressive racism. The article closes with liturgical and confessional routes to begin such a struggle.
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Notes
Here I am following the definition of a racist idea set forth by Ibram X. Kendi (2016) as “any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way” (p. 5). Aligning a community of black people with poverty without any other knowledge of that community besides its race and religion clearly falls under this definition of a racist idea. It sets whiteness above blackness in terms of class without knowledge of or regard to the people about whom the assumption was made.
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Acknowledgments
I am thankful to the participants in the 2017 Group for New Directions at Princeton Theological Seminary for their insightful comments on this article. I am also thankful to Marcia Mount Shoop and Keaton Hill for their advice on an early version of the essay. Finally, I would like to thank Amy Wiesner for helping design and co-lead the communion service I describe at the end of the paper.
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Coble, R. Struggling with Our Racism: White Progressive Christians and Lacan. Pastoral Psychol 68, 561–574 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-018-0818-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-018-0818-0